Review: Amazon Kindle Touch

Sub Title: The Kindle Touch Feels Good

Amazon Kindle Touch

9/10

Wired

Emphasis on reading and instant gratification in a comfortable package that actually improves on the e-ink touchscreen metaphor. Ads are not intrusive. It’s soothing to see page numbers that match up with the print world.

Tired

Though you can see community notes and tweet your progress while reading, the social layer is not as broad as the ones baked into the Nook and Kobo Touch.2

The text-based e-reader isn’t ready for the dustbin of history quite yet.

The Amazon Kindle was supposed to be slaughtered by the advent of the multi-use touchscreen tablet. And next to today’s shiny glass slates, the original Kindle, now four years old, looks as antiquated as, oh, the first iPod.

But like the iPod, the Kindle sparked a revolution, feeding a hunger few of us knew we had. As such, it has remained miraculously resilient and amazingly relevant.

The new Amazon Kindle Touch resembles the original Kindle in function only. It now has a touchscreen. Gone, finally, is the keyboard, which seemed out out of place even on the first model (though in the pre-tablet era, it presciently provided the owner with a way to make a brief pit stop, dashing off a mail or checking out a link). Gone as well are the page-turning buttons as users, even infants, assume and insist the screen be the sole interface.

The Kindle is the last of the three major e-readers to switch to touchscreens. Kobo was first, followed by the Barnes & Noble Nook. But this is not a space where being first matters. It’s the other stuff — the subtle enhancements that solve little problems, and the impressive ecosystem of content you use to fill it — that elevates a device.

These are the things that create a critical mass, and these are the reasons why you should consider an Amazon Touch instead of a touchscreen Nook or a touchscreen Kobo.

Let’s start with the biggest of the little things: the lack of page-turning buttons. Kobo eschews them, and uses each edge of the “page” to go forward or back. But two hands, really, are required for this. Nook uses two configurable buttons on the each edge of frame, so that you can also advance and retreat one-handed. But … isn’t this about being a touch device?

The Kindle Touch re-maps the e-ink page so that touching a thin, one-inch strip of the screen on the extreme left serves up the previous page. Touching any part of the rest of the screen, from the edge of that first inch all the way over to the right edge of the screen, goes to the next page. If you’re holding the Kindle with your left hand, it’s an easy stretch of the thumb.

Yes, we all switch hands, and going back a page while holding it right-handed becomes more complicated. But we go forward a page much more often than we go back a page, so going right-handed as your “resting” mode means this is a giant leap forward. And it’s not hard to imagine a next small step: a software upgrade making left/right implementation an on-the-fly user option.

There’s a thin strip at the very top of the screen which brings up a pop-up menu. Within that menu is another differentiating feature: Amazon’s X-ray service.

When you load up a book (some books, not all), additional data about proper-noun-type references like people, places and events, are loaded as well. All this data is held invisibly in the background inside a small, pre-loaded file. You can call up that info at any time while reading by touching the screen. So, if you’re reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and you want to know more about Joanne Simpson, just tap on her name. Within a click or two are a comprehensive bio and a list of the other places in the book where she is mentioned. Amazon culls this data from Wikipedia and Shelfari, and since it’s pre-loaded, you don’t need an internet connection to access the goods.

This is a godsend when you have put a book down for a while and forget who the players are — even if the book includes a section for cast of characters, pop-up trumps look-up every time.

Amazon’s integration with Overdrive, the clearinghouse libraries use to lend digital books, is much more straightforward than the competition’s lending services. And, Amazon has its own lending program you gain access to with your $79-per-year Amazon Prime membership.

A regular digital copy of Michael Lewis’ The Big Short sells for $7.17, but Amazon Prime members can read it for free, and it says so right on the book’s product page. Notes and highlights you make in borrowed books stay there — you’ll see them again if you re-borrow later.

The offerings are limited, but this represents a significant breakthrough with publishers, who Amazon famously battled over $10 best-sellers and lost. Though if I ran a lending library, I’d be asking some questions about this.

And there is still Whispernet, the free, always-on connection to Amazon.com that syncs all your Kindles and Kindle apps. If you’re willing to spend $150 on the 3G version of the Kindle Touch, it really is always-on. You can sync and purchase where Wi-Fi isn’t available.

I was wary about the imposition of advertisements (even the least intrusive ads on a smartphone app seem overbearing to me) but Amazon seems to have corralled the sponsored content just right. I tested the version of the Kindle Touch that displays ads. The offers are tame and relevant, with $1 books and Amazon’s branded credit card offers among them. Your screensaver is an ad, but touching the screen doesn’t wake the Kindle up or take you to the offer, which would be unfriendly if you touched it by accident. Within the Kindle, ads appear only at the bottom of index pages — never in a book — and rather than try to create some bad version of a black and white page to detail the offer, additional details are sent to you in an e-mail if you request more info.

All in all, I never felt compromised, and given that you save $40 on the purchase price, and that you will likely take advantage of some of these offers, Amazon has begun to gently condition us to appreciate the inevitability of ads in walled-in digital media as we have always accepted them on similarly-immersive television (Kobo took the hint this week, announcing a new Kobo Touch with Offers priced at $100, the same as Kindle’s lowest-priced touch device).

Oh, and did I mention the single “home” button, and one power button? Very Apple-esque. But rather than insist that the cloud be the only onramp, Amazon has allowed for the sideloading of content (audio and documents) over USB.1

Far from hanging on for dear life, text e-readers are undergoing a renaissance. There’s still plenty to improve, like the price (The $80 non-touch Kindle is almost, though not quite, cheap enough to make e-readers a basic, birth-right necessity). But there’s enough here for e-readers to demand a seat at the table in a world dominated by smartphones and tablets.

Note 1. The original version of this article misstated the device’s capabilities for sideloading media. Users can load text documents and audio files onto the Kindle Touch using the USB port.

Note 2. The original version of this article misstated the Kindle Touch’s social integration features. Users can highlight a passage, tap “share,” add a message, and post to social networks.